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STEPHEN DONADIO
tor, the type who hangs around the men's room at a dance, patting him–
self and talking about poontang." Barrett's amnesia, then, is to be taken
literally: there are times when he does not know who he is. Similarly, his
"nervous condition" suggests that, on occasion, he does not know what
to do.
In the course of the narrative, which moves from New York to the
Mississippi Delta to New Mexico, Barrett encounters the Vaught family.
Southern Baptists turned Episcopalian (though Mrs. Vaught, of course,
was already Episcopalian) as an indication of their increased status,
they engage the engineer as a companion for their dying son. He takes
the job; he has no other obligations and, besides, he is in love with
Kitty, the Vaughts's empty but attractive daughter. He wants to marry
her-wants, as he says, to marry him a wife and live him a life. Then
he meets Kitty's older brother, Sutter Vaught, and things become more
complicated. A brilliant doctor who does not practice, a burned-out case,
Sutter is the author of a scientific article titled
The Incidence of Post–
orgasmic Suicide in Male University Graduate Students;
it is "divided
into two sections, the first subtitled 'Genital Sexuality as the Sole Surviv–
ing Communication Channel between Transcending-Immanent Subjects,'
and the second, 'The Failure of Coitus as a Mode of Reentry into the
Sphere of Immanence from the Sphere of Transcendence.' " This opposi–
tion between "immanence" and "transcendence" is the book's major
theme, and it explains why the engineer can never finally decide whether
or not it is right for him to marry Kitty.
The fictional world established by the author is so airtight that his
attempts to reach beyond it can only be destructive. The three lapses in
the novel all occur when the action is explicitly related to something
which exists outside it, on a different plane. The episodes involving the
"pseudo-Negro," for example, a white reporter posing as a Negro
-Black Like Me-are
unconvincing for this reason, as is an incident
which can only suggest the arrival of James Meredith at Ole Miss. And
the same is true of one all-too-symbolic Huckleberry Finn-ish scene in
which Barrett goes across the river on a raft to reach the house where
his aunts live.
The Last Gentleman
is a haunting novel, and there is no way out
of it. There is no reconciliation possible between immanence and trans–
cendence, between being a fornicator and being a gentleman. The book
ends as it ends, quite literally in suspended animation, at precisely that
point beyond which any further action is unthinkable.
Stephen Donadio
